I've been covering the transportation industry for 20 years. Past publications include The Charlotte Observer, Miami Herald and Sacramento Bee. I also worked for U.S. Airways, writing internal publications and speeches for the company's executives. I'm a graduate of Wesleyan University and have a master's in journalism from Columbia University. Unlike most bloggers, I don't hate airlines.

The Transportation Security Administration has taken off the gloves and started to respond more aggressively to the constant barrage of criticism – as well it should.

Last week, in an opinion piece in the Rockland County Times, published in a close-in New York City suburb, TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein responded to a critical column by area resident Diane Dimond, a syndicated columnist.

”Perhaps the next time Diane and her family fly out of a New York-area airport to a fun vacation spot, they’ll look out the car window at the New York skyline minus the Twin Towers and remember some of the true facts about TSA and why it exists,” Farbstein wrote.

Dimond “criticized the very security measures that were designed to keep passengers safe —to help ensure that there is not another 9/11 in her back yard,” said Farbstein, who answered about a dozen criticisms, point-by-point. Among them: it is inconvenient, undignified and an invasion of your privacy to be forced to remove your shoes, jackets and belts, take off your belt and take your computer from its case. TSA agents “treat all of us like we’re new arrivals at a prison camp.” The lines are too long and some agents seem to stand around doing nothing.

While the criticisms are familiar, the aggressive response is new. In fact, the TSA responds to multiple daily attacks, most far less coherent than Dimond’s. Critics include travelers who make up stories; members of Congress who seek political gain and bloggers, tweeters and other self-promoters aware that the best way to be noticed and collect Internet hits is to express outrage. The outrage business, it must be said, is a growth business, thriving in the age of new media.

Last week, radio talk show host Dana Loesch tweeted about an incident at the Phoenix airport. Loesch claimed she was sexually molested after a sensor showed traces of explosives on her. She was upset that the incident took place in private: she had requested a public screening. Earlier,in June, Loesch and her husband were detained by the TSA in Providence, R.I., after he allegedly underwent intrusive screenings because sensors detected traces of explosives on him.

Perhaps we should conclude that TSA agents are engaged in a nationwide plot to harass the couple whenever possible. Or perhaps explosive pixie dust suddenly finds them whenever they head to the airport. Clearly, they are outliers among the 650 million people TSA screens annually. Last year, about one tenth of one percent of those filed complaints.

The truth is that, for all of the complaints, most U.S. travelers have a positive opinion of the TSA. According to a Gallup poll released in August, 54% of Americans think TSA is doing either an excellent or a good job of handling airport screening. Among Americans who have flown at least once in the past year, 57% have an excellent or good opinion of the agency. In other words, the more you see them, the better you like them.

Of course, TSA is not perfect. It employs 62,000 people, a few of whom have stolen from the luggage they are paid to inspect. The annual $8.1 billion budget seems high: the same work was done for far less by private firms before Sept. 11. The firms followed federal guidelines, which sadly did not prevent box cutters on airplanes. The TSA is very visible to millions of travelers, some of whom have had a bad day by the time they get to the airport. And of course the agency is overseen by a dysfunctional Congress, whose 535 members bring a love of the limelight, vastly differing agendas and an inability to compromise.

Probably the biggest problem is that, unfortunately, we really don’t know how much screening is enough and how much is too much. Eleven years later, that is something we are still learning.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

This is as unpersuasive as Farbstein’s emotional play. Anyone who travels outside the U.S. can compare the TSA to its counterparts and judge the value and performance–I doubt that many in the polling sample you cite had that basis of comparison. Also there is no second page of this post as indicated.

The TSA has done absolutely nothing to foil any terrorist act on American soil or in American skies. The next time a group or an individual with an agenda decides to wreak havoc on the American people, it’s going to happen, regardless of how many times I remove my belt and shoes at the airport. If anyone thinks he’s 100 percent safe in the friendly skies, he’s delusional. However, according to my estimates, I have a much higher probability of dying in a plane crash due to crew error than I do being blown out of the sky by a bomb or flown into a skyscraper. But, if people feel safer believing they’re going to be protected by a rag-tag group of high school dropouts with plastic badges and power trips, to each his own.

The DHS and TSA have a well-developed internal counter-culture that is out of step with the American main stream.

“Remember 9-11″ and “It’s SSI” are thought-terminatinclichéses that work well within the TSA’s increasingly insular world, but fall flat on mainstream Americans. If the TSA really wants to persuade main stream America to tolerate their lunacy, they’re going to have to stop using the same terms on the public that work so well on their thoroughly indocrinated employees.

Americans have seen extremist movements and cults before. Most of us have enough common sense not to drink the kool aid. The TSA will have to reform or go the way of other short-lived fascist movements. In the meantime, it would be wise if someone with a bit of common sense was hired to interface between the TSAs mindless minions and the general public.

The DHS and TSA have a well-developed internal counter-culture that is out of step with the American main stream.

“Remember 9-11″ and “It’s SSI” are thought-terminating clichés that work well within the TSA’s increasingly insular world, but fall flat on mainstream Americans. If the TSA really wants to persuade main stream America to tolerate their lunacy, they’re going to have to stop using the same terms on the public that work so well on their thoroughly indocrinated employees.

Americans have seen extremist movements and cults before. Most of us have enough common sense not to drink the kool aid. The TSA will have to reform or go the way of other short-lived fascist movements. In the meantime, it would be wise if someone with a bit of common sense was hired to interface between the TSAs mindless minions and the general public.

It’s so heartening to see that a majority of flyer’s are happy to have their civil rights violated in the interests of safety. That the TSA has not stopped a single terrorist in their entire existence is of no concern to these cowering sheep. As this editorial makes clear, every police state needs its apologists.

“The poll, which targeted only self-identified frequent fliers, found 91 percent thought TSA is doing a fair or poor job with airport security screenings. Seventy-six percent thought the agency is ineffective at preventing acts of terrorism on an aircraft.”

If you want to know the face of the TSA, read the comments to the Farbstein article referenced above from a person who says he is a former TSA Supervisor. Those comments tell you all you need to know about the TSA.

1)We have learned all we need to know about airport security. It is called metal detectors, which worked fine for decades. Shoes on, liquids allowed, and good to go. All of this worked quite well (had nothing to do with 911) before, during, and after 911 up to 2010 when the illegal strip search scanners and sexual assault pat downs were rolled out by the GeTSApo.

2) 911 is a tragic case, but nothing about scanners or even metal detectors would change the events. Anyone could take a sharpened ballpoint pen or break a laptop screen to create a sharp object. They could then threaten passengers and crew. Heck, they could even “claim” to have a bomb. Regardless, the locked, reinforced cockpit doors and the “fight to the death” mentality of passengers make any hijacking in the US remote indeed. Other than that, nothing about 911 is different or prevented even under today’s legal and illegal security procedures.

3) Join http://fttusa.org to stay up to date on TSA news and our efforts to get legislators and others to reclaim the stolen 4th Amendment rights and stop the criminal unwanted genital assaults of the TSA.

I no longer fly on any flight that would require submitting to TSA’s untested scanners and/or physical groping. Relying on ‘frequent fliers’ or people who fly at all to evaluate the TSA skews the results, since by definition, they have a higher tolerance for authoritarianism than those of us who have truly opted out. If the nation’s founders had been as cowardly as those who hide behind 9/11 as an excuse to build a totalitarian police state, we would still be a colony of Great Britain. I hope that the author is right about one thing, that the TSA is escalating the ferocity with which it answers the non-stop complaints against it. That means we are winning.

Note to the clueless, this much screening is too much. Are we clear now? This comes on the same day that ABC ranks the top 20 airports in TSA thefts.

Perhaps Ms. Farbstein can explain how TSA is keeping us safe when they haven’t even identified a single terrorist after 11 years and over $80 billion.

Maybe she can explain how stealing our property is going to prevent another 9/11.

Or how humiliating and exposing a dying woman’s feeding tube at the checkpoint despite her repeated request for a private screening is preventing a terrorist attack.

Maybe she can explain how keeping a known pedophile, Thomas Harkins, working at Philadelphia airport six months after he was exposed is keeping our skies safe.

Can she explain how having over a dozen TSA screeners smuggling drugs and guns through our airports in the past 24 months is essential to airport security?

We would like to know how having 101 TSA workers arrested in the last 24 months including 13 arrested for child sex crimes, over 28 for theft, 12 for smuggling contraband through security and one for murder is acceptable when no other agency has anywhere near this number of criminal arrests.

Can she explain why it is essential to grope adults but children, the elderly and frequent fliers can get a free pass whenever TSA decides to let them through.

Maybe she will answer why the agency hasn’t obeyed the court order to take public comment on the scanners and is now moving the dangerous x-ray units to small airports to hide them from the millions who use that major airports.

To listen to her sociopathic ranting, we should just accept any abuse they heap on us or the will invoke 9/11 as an excuse for their criminality and misconduct.

She is a liar and this and this is an insulting piece of propaganda. Irresponsible media reporting like this promoting TSA lies is disgraceful. It is slowing reform of this failed agency and making air travel less secure.

Thugs and thieves. That’s what we’ve ended up with for our TSA. Thugs and thieves of low education, recruited off pizza boxes, given power and authority that they cannot handle, and are left to abuse terribly with no oversight or accountability.

This is security theater played out at a high cost, both monetarily and to our liberties. They keep crying out 911 911 911 as justification for the erosion of our civil rights, but what they do does not make us safer. Even if it did somehow make us safer to have our cupcakes, shampoo, nailclippers removed, maxipads examined, colostomy bags checked, it is not worth losing what we’ve fought so hard for in this country – our liberty.

As noted in other first world nations with a far longer history of terrorism than here in the United States, they do quite well with out the probings, magnetic imaging, and shoe removal. The TSA is just another unneeded massive bureaucracy designed with the to cause the American public to live in fear of a nonexistent bogey man.

Was this the most flattering picture you could find of a TSA agent? A pig in an ill fitting uniform, sweating from the effort of lifting his arms to shoulder height? It doesn’t really lend to the idea of a well trained force, here to protect the nation. More to the idea of a low paid force, here to draw a paycheck in between trips to the airport Cinnabon.

Oh, farking bloody hell. You are not SERIOUSLY trotting about “But… but… 9/11!” to justify the ludicrous excesses and abuses of the TSA? As with most jumped-up thugs, they revel in their power to abuse, harass, and demean anyone they feel like. Sputtering “Terrorism!” at every complaint is growing old. No, wait. It grew old years ago; it’s now in a nursing home waiting to die in its own filth. Stop reviving the poor old meme and let it mercifully expire.

Playing the percentage game is likewise an attempt at distraction. How many times is it acceptable for an agent of the government to violate an individual’s right? Your “one tenth of one percent” is 650,000 people. That’s the population of many cities. It’s about the entire population of North Dakota. (This presumes that most people who would have a complaint actually filed. Given the “spitting into the wind” nature of criticizing those SELFLESS HEROES who are PROTECTING US FROM TERRORISTS, I suspect most people don’t bother filing, just as most people know better than to criticize the police, no matter what. It just sets you up for more trouble. Has anyone checked to see if there’s a link between “people filing TSA complaints” and “people later singled out for inspection by the TSA”? Would it surprise anyone if there was?

The *purpose* of government, as I’d like to think the presumed conservatives at Forbes are aware, is to *protect* the rights of the individual — not to violate them and then scream “BUT TERRORISTS!” at anyone who complains.

The question for me is not are we safer, but what is the price for the safety and is it worth it.

We are giving up rights that we have as Americans for what at best appears to be a veil of safety, and we are getting exposed to dangerous items like radiation. We are giving up respect to our fellow people.

9/11 was tragic, people died, but anyone who says that more people will not die in acts of terror no matter what we can do has missed the past 2000 years of history. But the loss of our rights for safety is not an offset in costs.

Americans are patriotic, brave, and come to the call what is needed to be done. We did this in every war including the current ones. We as citizens are prepared to take risk as a price of our rights and freedoms. We are not cowards, we are not to be distrusted, we have the right to be free. The balance of this and what the TSA has done has been crossed, and I fear there may be no going back.

I respect what the TSA is trying to do, just not the price we have to pay to do it. The real risk to us is not the foreign terrorist, but the domestic one, and they will use a truck (First world trade center, Oklahoma bombing). No matter what we do, history shows there ways to get around it.

In the mean time our enemy’s with very little cost to them, are forcing us to spend ourselves to become bankrupt. They paid attention to the tactics of President Ronald Reagen who did this to the USSR and brought down the USSR by preying on their fear. It worked there, it could work here too if we let it. It’s sad when they know our history and techniques better than we do. Whomever they are :)

This is a poor argument. The TSA keeps making things more embarrassing and invasive for passengers, frying medical equipment in scanners, refusing privacy for women based on how difficult it would make their day to respond to those requests, and generally engage in a race towards the bottom in ineptitude. While still letting people with explosives on planes! While still missing knives and guns! They are ineffectual and hire idiots who stand around doing nothing, only bothering to work to screw over innocent Americans.

I find it difficult to believe that ANYONE, who has flown in the past few years, finds the TSA to be anything more than a tremendous waste of taxpayer money and a complete violation of personal privacy.

Come on guys. That gallery is pathetic. Anybody with an ounce of common sense would be capable of recognizing that the “brass knuckle clutch” would be completely useless as a weapon, those “bullet belts” are CLEARLY fake bullets, and the “air rifle” pictured is a cheap scope *FOR* a bb gun, not the actual gun itself. The notion that items can be confiscated because they’re heavy and might conceivably be used to do harm is a pathetic prima facie justification for utterly nonsensical behavior.

This article and its gallery are shallow, ignorant, and entirely lacking in critical thought, journalistic integrity, or common sense. I understand that actual journalism is unfashionable these days but next time you feel like phoning it in just do us a favor and post a scan of the TSA press release.

The TSA would not have stopped 9/11 and I find it very disrespectful that the TSA would even imply that invading people’s privacy and insulting their dignity is necessary to stop events like 9/11. The 9/11 hijackers were all screened and would even pass right through today’s screening process. What is preventing another 9/11 i hear you say? The improvement of intelligence services systems, improved procedures for dealing with hijacked planes and good old fashioned locks on cabin doors. I would think that an agency that has caught a grand total of 0 terrorists in it’s 11 years of operation might be a little less brazen with it’s insulting manipulation of a global tragedy. I was wrong.

How many 9/11′s have you prevented TSA? Oh yeah thats right, either NONE or you won’t tell us. Because there aren’t any, your prevention is about as justified as Obama saying we would have lost 1 MILLION jobs if GM was broken up, patently false.

Bring in the dogs (the world wide best known explosive detector) and ditch the groping. Knives? Allow passengers to be armed with knives again, and a new and certain attitude about how to deal with clear and present hijacking attempts (kill the attackers like Flight 93). Then I am happy to have your reminders of 9/11 so we remain vigilant.

Remember the passengers of flight 93 for they saved far more then TSA. We should learn from their example and strengthen or nation and airways through actual citizen power.

Less than 0.1% of 650,000,000 passengers is still over half a MILLION complaints. That’s not anything they should brag about.

TSA has a very hard job – it’s hard to demonstrate effectiveness by *preventing* something. And they are in the position of always reacting to threats, it’s not easy to be proactive in their position. Still, they are rightly criticized for simplistic rules enforced with religious zealotry.

Your article is a truly pathetic attempt to justify the existence of an agency that should never have been created. I’ve read a lot of content-free tripe in my time, but your poorly-written article really takes the cake. I’m not scared to fly and I sure as heck don’t feel any safer due to the harassment I receive by TSA. Their unnecessary measures range from idiotic and un-American like ID and boarding pass inspection to the criminal: sexual assault mis-labeled as a “pat-down”. If you or anyone else is so cowardly that you need this kind of harassment to fly in America, please do the rest of us a favor and stay home. Hide in the closet, move to to North Korea, or at least get some Depends. Just stay home with your irrational paranoia and let the rest of us fly.

I hope Congress eliminates this horrible agency and sends most of them to prison for treason and sexual assault. TSA is terrorism, plain and simple.

Mr. Reed, I would think that a contributor to Forbes would have the critical thinking ability to understand the unsubstantiated and brazenly cloying comment by Ms. Farbstein. Her assertions are totally bereft of factual analysis of the TSA’s efficacy – or not – since 2001. I am quite disappointed that you have bought into her paranoid fantasy. But, since you apparently have, I would remind you not to cross your eyes, because they might stay that way. And then read Frequent Business Traveler’s poll that shows that among those that actually fly, the percentage of those that believe the TSA is effective (good or excellent) is a paltry 9.2%.

Making a security cleared citizen that is a trusted traveler take off his shoes and belt has nothing to do with security. In Israel and the UK I didn’t have to do any of that before flying. They have TSA Pre for trusted travelers but being able to use that depends on which airline you are flying with. Whoever would think that the airline you are flying with determines whether or not you are trusted for the day? They should allow people with clearances and all trusted travelers through the old type of scanner – without having to remove shoes, jackets, belts and laptops.

Zero terrorists have been caught/stopped by TSA. Zero. Not one. Over $8,000,000,000 spent every year so that pedophiles can grope children at the airport. My question to you is: did you not know that this happens, or are you excited by it?

I think the TSA is a GREAT idea, and a wonderful resource to the American people. Since the skies are the ONLY way to attack this country, it’s nice that we devote so much of our defense budget toward protecting it. Since there are no terrorists that currently live here that could decimate this great country without even needing to travel, I think it’s awesome that the TSA, which surprisingly has never stopped a terrorist, is given such a large amount of money to keep protecting us. Isn’t it food for thought that no 9/11 has happened again since the Federal Government scrambled to enact this great government agency? I think it’s proof that, despite the fact weapons are still getting on board while thousands are getting sexually assaulted, for all of its problems, the TSA is well worth it.